This film anthology features 5 short stories with a frame story to tie everything together. Overall, the films are a bit cheesy, but bring the feeling of old horror comic books like Tales from the Crypt that act as gory morality plays. I liked how the bright red light highlighted the moments of horror in each segment.
The prologue/epilogue segment shows a kid that was reading the stories abused and mocked by his father. It nicely ties together the stories, provides a little more of that gruesome justice associated with these comics. Father's Day features decadent descendants enjoying their murdered father's money. It drags on a bit at the beginning and has a chilling ending. While these are usually morality plays, this one is a little more complex than usual. The long suffering daughter Bedelia snaps one day and kills her father, but only after he amassed his fortune in very illegal and immoral ways, emotionally abused her for years as she took care of him, and orchestrated the murder of her boyfriend. She killed him in a fit of rage and decades of bottled up emotions while he did tons more for no justified reason. I'm completely of on the descendant's side, so I didn't agree with the ending at all even though it was pretty awesome.
The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verill has a backwoods yokel finding a meteor and being infected by some sort of plant disease. This one is a bit depressing and pretty badly acted by Stephen King. Jordy doesn't want to go to the doctor out of fear, so he just waits until he's entirely overtaken by the plant and commits suicide. The beginning is so goofy and over the top with his cheesy imaginings that the end contrasts nicely as serious and dark. There's no humor in his death and it's a shame that a doctor might have been able to help him. A lot of people do wait to long or never go to the doctor in this society where they either have no money or fear what really might be wrong with them.
Something to Tide You Over is a super punny title that features a delightfully sinister Leslie Nielsen as a psychopath murdering his unfaithful wife and her lover. I can't take the man seriously after all of the Naked Gun and other parody films he's done, but it's a nice change of pace. The technology is pretty laughable. How can there be a full TV and VCR set out on the beach? The actual method of the murder was torturous and cruel as the victims are buried up to their neck in sand and left to drown as the tide comes in. The ending is satisfying and a little gruesome, in the same vein as the first segment with less moral complexity.
The Crate is kind of a weird one. A man loathes his wife and daily dreams of murdering her. He finds the perfect way to dispose of her and goes through with his plan. Why not just divorce? It just seems like a lot of trouble when an alternative, legal, simple solution is available. This ending is open ended and who knows what could happen. It also kind of goes against the formula that the evil are punished in the end as the husband seems to get away with the crime. It's way more evil to me to murder your wife via a trapped creature in a crate than to humiliate and abuse your husband daily. It obviously isn't moral to do that either, but murder isn't exactly a proper punishment. The open end may be implying that the creature will eventually come for him, but it wasn't very clear. The segment was going so well and then the creature is shown fully, up close. The best thing with creatures like this is to show it as little as possible because the mind will picture way worse than they could ever create.
They're Creeping Up on You is my favorite segment. An insufferable man who treats no one in his life with respect is obsessed with being clean. His apartment becomes infested with copious amounts of cockroaches and it tortures him to no end. He spends hours trying to call someone to get rid of them, but continually abuses even those who are supposed to help him. The apartment looks nauseating by the end when it was pristinely white in the beginning. The ending has one of the most horrific images I have ever seen and one of the best instances of practical effects. Overall, I think the hype for Creepshow is a little overblown, but the segments are mostly enjoyable. They bring nostalgia, a dose of horror, and a heaping helping of morality.
My rating: 4/5 fishmuffins
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